Hillary Clinton: Myth and Reality

It's been a long journey for Hillary Clinton. But after years of political and personal challenges, the secretary of state is exactly where she belongs. Read the interview below and then check out behind-the-scenes images from Clinton's Bazaar photo shoot.

On the evening of December 13, Hillary Clinton was on stage in the Benjamin Franklin Room of the State Department, introducing Broadway composer Marvin Hamlisch at a holiday reception for the diplomatic corps. That morning, she had risen at 5:00 to fly to Quebec for the North American Foreign Ministers Meeting, which was like taking tea on the tundra. It was minus 4 degrees with the wind chill, and after the meeting, Clinton made small talk about skiing and did a photo call outside without a coat. She flew back to Washington, D.C., got changed, and headed to the reception, where she and President Obama addressed the family of Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke, who had suffered an aortic tear in Clinton's offices three days earlier and was clinging to life in a nearby hospital. Holbrooke died that night, and his close friend Clinton, as much a den mother as a diplomat, took his shaken staff to a bar.

"That day looked to be pretty predictable when it started," Clinton recalls in January in an anteroom near her office. "Richard's critical illness was much on my mind, and that made it even more important to me that we stay on schedule, we get back." After her speech, Clinton was heading to a dinner at the White House when she got word that Holbrooke was failing. "We immediately went to the hospital. It was a very long night of anguish and tears, but then we got together and started trading stories," she says. At the bar at the Ritz-Carlton, Clinton presided over an improvised Irish wake. Derek Chollet, principal deputy director of Clinton's policy-planning staff, who was very close to Holbrooke, says, "Everyone in the room that night would take a bullet for her."

The first question for Hillary Rodham Clinton, 67th secretary of state, a woman who has lived in the spotlight--and has been a crucible for public opinion--for more than three decades, is exactly how she does it. At 63, when she could be raking in money from speaking engagements or lying on the beach, she is more invigorated than ever. Theories abound among her close friends and staff: "She has a 'for country' gene," observes her counselor and chief of staff, Cheryl Mills. "A fifth gear," says longtime adviser Philippe Reines. "I really don't know," others say.

A different gene? "Hmm, it could be," Clinton ponders. She looks trim, her hair longer of late ("You like it this way? Thanks!" she responds girlishly to a compliment), and she's wearing a tailored gray pantsuit and two strings of South Sea pearls. She seems vibrant, engaged. "Well, I love what I do, and I love the people I do it with. I've had the most lucky life because I've gotten to do all these amazing things over the last 25 years. I've had extraordinary good luck with my health, other than a broken elbow," she says, referring to her injury in June 2009, which sidelined her early in her new role. "There's no day that is the same as the day before. So you have to be energized; you have to be focused."

There must be days, though, when Clinton doesn't want to get out of bed. "Oh, God, yes," she says. "The mornings are okay, but by the end of the day, I'm sometimes so tired that I just go home, put my feet up, read magazines, watch TV, try to take my mind out of where I've been all day."

Thankfully, Clinton is a diligent organizer of her own time. She has a personal trainer who "comes and tortures me" at her Washington residence at 6:00 A.M. up to three times a week. "Not that it shows," she chuckles, "but it does energize me." She is also a champion napper. Reines notes that in her cabin on her Special Air Mission plane, Clinton can sleep through both takeoff and landing. "I often sleep through both, yeah," she says. How? "Because I'm so tired! I think I'm chronically exhausted." Unsurprisingly, she's big on caffeine. "When I'm in meetings, fending off jet lag, and people come with the trays of coffee and tea, I think, Oh, my gosh, I'll stay awake for another hour."

The consensus is that more than two years into her position as secretary of state, Clinton has found her groove. Although she occupies the world's most prominent and challenging diplomatic post, she seems almost ... relieved. "This is a nonpolitical job," she explains. "I'm not in the fray the way that I was, and that gives you a certain sort of safe haven, even though much of what I do is by nature difficult and in some quarters controversial, because how you deal with China, how you deal with Russia ..." Do you smile at Hugo Chávez or not? She nods. "Do you smile at Chávez or not."

So often vilified during her time as first lady of the United States, Clinton is now often cited as the country's most admired woman. This is gratifying to her staff, who collectively feel something like vindication that the American public is finally getting what they knew all along. "The caricature of her was that she was frosty, calculating, unfeeling," says Reines. "But what was so surprising to me was not how wrong it was but how quickly you see that it's wrong." "I could never understand it," says Capricia Penavic Marshall, U.S. chief of protocol. "People had preconceived notions about her. But I think she is now seen for more of the person that she is." Adds Mills, "You are grateful when people you believe in get positive recognition for who they are."

Clinton herself must have noticed this sea change. "You know, I don't think about it because I've always been the same person, but I've been in different situations," she says. "And the way I've either been judged or criticized has as much to do with what I was doing. Like, for example, as we've seen recently with President Obama, when you take on health care, you are going to be heavily criticized. I took it on as first lady," she says, recalling the 1993 Clinton health-care plan, which died in Congress. "It was a very difficult experience, but it was the right thing to do. It laid the groundwork for what I hope will be a lasting, major accomplishment of this administration. But it had so much less to do with me than the fact that I was willing to take on a hard issue."

She seems resigned to gender being an issue in politics. "Being a serious candidate for president as a woman brought out all the stuff that still exists about that," she says. "Some of it was personal, some of it was gender based, and you kind of accept it. I think that if you live long enough, you realize that so much of what happens in life is out of your control, but how you respond to it is in your control. That's what I try to remember."

Indeed. While Clinton has taken to her role like a duck to water, 2010 had its challenges. The release of a cache of U.S. embassy cables by WikiLeaks, in which confidential and sometimes critical observations of foreign officials and policy were made public, was an embarrassment to the American government. Clinton approached the issue the way she approaches everything: pragmatically. Over many "long days," she made call lists and methodically worked her way through them. "I told somebody, 'You know how rock groups go on these global tours? I should have a jacket that says THE APOLOGY TOUR because everywhere I go, I'm apologizing for any embarrassment,'" she says wryly.

Clinton says WikiLeaks "just added multiple additional layers of responsibility and outreach. The diplomats were doing their jobs. You get unvarnished opinions, but they are just opinions. They are not policy, and they should not be in any way confused with policy. But some of the judgments made, the opinions that were offered, were embarrassing to people."

She continues, "Then there were people who said, 'How can I ever have a candid conversation with you again if these things are going to be reported?' Which were never meant to be exposed until maybe 50 years from now. So we've had to really work hard to maintain that candor that is critical to diplomacy."

The real danger of WikiLeaks, Clinton argues, is "a third category where, because of what was exposed, people are physically at risk. They are sources for us, they are human-rights advocates, they are whistle-blowers around the world. So that's been the most long-lasting damage, and it's serious damage."

The stresses of Clinton's position are hard to imagine ("Sometimes I get very upset and angry if I think that people are doing things that are stupid, or put other people at risk, or are breaking agreements"), but she deals with it in her own way. She loves to swim "in pools, in oceans, in lakes." When she heads home to Chappaqua, in upstate New York, on the weekends, she does yoga with a teacher. She's also fond of putting her house in order: "Clean out a closet, a kitchen drawer, anything that has a beginning, a middle, and an end, because much of what I do goes on and on and on."

She and President Clinton clear their heads with long walks. "We go off with the dogs and have a good walk through the woods, then usually a movie, out to dinner," she says. Thanks to their friends in the entertainment industry, the Clintons have a pile of Oscar screeners at home: "The King's Speech, that's on the top of my list. I want to see True Grit, The Kids Are All Right ..."

On television, Clinton tries not to miss Grey's Anatomy. "I am fascinated by the incidents they manufacture. It's just amazing to me. The guy has a bomb in his belly. Oh, okay. ..." Also, thanks to her 91-year-old mother, Dorothy Rodham, she is regularly briefed on Dancing with the Stars. "My mother was pulling for [last season's winner] Jennifer Grey. I mean, she was so empathetic with the cancer and the screws and the plates and the back, the whole deal." And what of Bristol Palin? "I'm speaking for my mother here; my mother thought it was very nice that she competed but that she was not up to Jennifer by any means."

Clinton's knowledge of popular culture is on a higher level than that of most in the governmental set. Senior adviser Lona Valmoro remembers briefing her on a meeting with Angelina Jolie in 2005. "She was like, 'Oh, Tomb Raider.'"

On fashion, Clinton is self-deprecating and often hilarious. She's known for her pantsuits, but her staffers say nothing makes her happier than a good handbag. "I do love a good handbag," she agrees. Can accessories be the great uniter of women? "I think they could be either a great divider or uniter," she replies. "I'm on the uniter side. I think no one should make fun of anyone else's handbag choices." She warms to the topic. "I think we should be united in our support of one another. Because this is like a deep psychological need. It's a desire to kind of organize and contain that which is important to you in your daily life. I have a philosophical view about this, and I have this Ferragamo hot-pink bag that I adore. My view was that I would carry it around only in spring, but it makes me so happy, I'm even now lugging it around in January. I mean, how can you be unhappy if you pick up a big pink bag?"

In her 2003 memoir, Living History, Clinton was equally amusing on the topic of her "lifelong hair struggles." She is bemused by the press she received last September during the UN General Assembly in New York, a fateful day when she put her hair up with a butterfly clip. "It was a Sunday," she says, "a day of rest! I had actually lost track of time, to be honest, and I'd gone swimming, and then I realized I had to get moving, and I didn't have time to do anything else, so I really just did the best I could." She starts to laugh. "I didn't think it looked that bad, but ... what do I know?"

Clinton is often surprised when people tell her she is so much prettier in the flesh. "It's nice, but on the other hand, you think, Oh, my God, most people never see me in person; what do they think I look like? I do not take pictures well, I know that." Ironically, on meeting Chávez in Brazil in January, Clinton looked radiant, like she couldn't wait to have a beer with him. "Really?" She asks one of her staff to pull up the picture. "Huh. Well, that's the only way to deal with him, I think."

Bill Clinton once said of his wife that she was "going to live to be 110. She might have three husbands after me." Clinton laughs and says, "Well, I doubt that very much. I'm not going to do this forever. I want to teach. I want to speak. I want to travel." She also wants to spend more time with her family, with her newly married daughter, Chelsea, who is clearly the delight of her life. Ask Clinton if she looks forward to being a grandmother one day and she replies, "Well, no pressure, because I don't want to be one of those kinds of mothers. But obviously, someday, I'd love it." What kind of grandmother would she be? "Probably an unbearable one, the kind who is saying, 'Oh, my gosh, I'll take the child, I'll do whatever you need to get done.'"

She says that Chelsea has not expressed an interest in politics, but should she change her mind, "I have such confidence in her, she'll do what she thinks is right for her. I'm really only wanting her to follow whatever course makes her happy."

As for Clinton's own postsecretary course, she says, "I'd probably teach international relations, current events, something involving women's roles and rights around the world. I have no idea what I'm going to do, but I have a lot of interests that I hope to fulfill. And then an occasional beach, an occasional time-out."

And what of 2016, the next date Clinton could conceivably run for president? "I have no thoughts for 2016," she says with a benevolent smile. "Beaches ... speeches."